The Fifth Doctor is an incarnation of the Doctor, the protagonist of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. He is portrayed by Peter Davison.^[4]

Within the series' narrative, the Doctor is a centuries-old alien Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey who travels in time and space in the TARDIS, frequently with companions. At the end of life, the Doctor regenerates; as a result, the physical appearance and personality of the Doctor changes. Preceded in regeneration by the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker), he is followed by the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker).

Davison portrays the Fifth Doctor as having a vulnerable side and a tendency towards indecisiveness, dressed as a boyish Edwardian cricketer. He travelled with a host of companions, including boy genius Adric (Matthew Waterhouse), alien aristocrat Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) and Australian flight attendant Tegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding), who had travelled with his previous incarnation. He also shared later adventures alongside devious schoolboy Vislor Turlough (Mark Strickson) and American college student Peri Brown (Nicola Bryant).^[4]

After Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, and the BBC had announced that he was leaving the role, the show's producers decided that the next Doctor was to be played by someone who presented something of a physical contrast to Baker and by an actor who was already firmly established in the British public's mind. Peter Davison was chosen due to his critically acclaimed role as Tristan Farnon in the BBC series All Creatures Great and Small which had Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner as line producer.^[5]

The Fifth Doctor's era was notable for a "back to the basics" attitude, in which "silly" humour (and, to an extent, horror) was kept to a minimum, and more scientific accuracy was encouraged by the producer, John Nathan-Turner. It was, at times, a darker and grittier series, in part for seeing the death of one of his companions, Adric. It was also notable for the reintroduction of many of the Time Lord's enemies, such as the Master, Cybermen, Omega, the Black and White Guardians, and the Silurians.^[6]

The Fourth Doctor was seriously injured after falling off the Pharos Project Radio Telescope so he merged with a future incarnation of himself called the Watcher and regenerated into his new youthful fifth incarnation. The regeneration was difficult, and nearly failed, with the Doctor briefly taking on personality aspects from his four previous incarnations. After recovering in the fictional city Castrovalva (actually an elaborate trap created by his arch-enemy the Master), he continued his travels with Adric, Tegan Jovanka and Nyssa. Initially his travels centred on getting Tegan back to Heathrow Airport in time for her first day as an airhostess, but the TARDIS repeatedly missed this destination and Tegan eventually decided to stay in the TARDIS. After trips to the future and the past encountering villains such as Monarch and the Mara, the Fifth Doctor was confronted with tragedy when Adric died trying to stop a space freighter from crashing into prehistoric Earth (Earthshock).^[4]

Following Adric's death, the TARDIS accidentally arrived at Heathrow airport (Time-Flight). Here the Doctor and Nyssa left Tegan assuming she would want to stay (when in fact she did not any more). The Doctor and Nyssa then travelled together for an unspecified amount of time before the renegade Time Lord Omega, attempting to return to the universe, temporally bonded himself to the Doctor (Arc of Infinity). Faced with this threat, the Time Lords were forced to attempt executing the Doctor, but he eventually tracked Omega to Amsterdam where he defeated him and re-encountered Tegan (who having now lost her job, had no second thoughts about rejoining the TARDIS crew).

When the Doctor met a new companion, an alien boy stranded on Earth by the name of Vislor Turlough, he did not know that Turlough had been commissioned by the Black Guardian to kill him. Soon after, Nyssa left to help cure Lazar's Disease on the space station Terminus. After meeting the entities known as Eternals racing in yacht-like spacecraft for the prize of "Enlightenment", Turlough broke free from the Black Guardian's influence, and continued to travel with the Doctor and Tegan. Landing in the reign of King John (The King's Demons), the crew again encountered the Master, who was using a shape-shifting robot Kamelion to impersonate the King. However, the Doctor helped Kamelion to regain his free will and the robot joined him in his travels (although he rarely left the TARDIS). The Doctor met three of his previous incarnations when they were summoned to the Death Zone on Gallifrey by president Borusa, who was attempting to gain Rassilon's secret of immortality.

After further adventures in which the Doctor re-encountered old foes, including the Silurians and the Sea Devils (Warriors of the Deep), both Tegan and Turlough left the TARDIS. Tegan would find the death and violence they encountered on their travels too much to bear (Resurrection of the Daleks), and Turlough returned to his home planet of Trion in the company of his younger brother, as well as other exiles of Trion, from the planet Sarn. The Doctor was eventually forced to destroy Kamelion, when the Master used his mental connection to the robot to regain control of him, a process the robot realised was irreversible (Planet of Fire).

Ultimately (The Caves of Androzani), the Fifth Doctor and his last companion Peri Brown were exposed to the drug spectrox in its deadly toxic raw form on Androzani Minor. With only one dose of the antidote available, he nobly sacrificed his own existence to save Peri, expressing doubt for the first time that regeneration might be possible this time, then regenerating into the Sixth Doctor.

A sketch of the Fifth Doctor is seen in John Smith's book in the new series episode "Human Nature" (2007). Visions of the Fifth Doctor (alongside other past Doctors) appear in "The Next Doctor" (2008) and "The Eleventh Hour" (2010).

Somewhere in his life he crashed his TARDIS into the TARDIS of the Tenth Doctor and consequently nearly opened a "Belgium-sized" black hole because of the paradox caused, which the Tenth Doctor also uses to explain the notably aged appearance of his former self. However the Tenth Doctor, remembering the event, knew how to stop it because he recalled watching himself correct the mistake when he was the Fifth Doctor. ("Time Crash")

When entering the Doctor's time stream in "The Name of the Doctor", Clara Oswald saves the Fifth Doctor (who doesn't notice her) from the Great Intelligence (having entered his time stream prior to her).

At another unknown point in his life, the Fifth Doctor piloted his TARDIS along with the rest of his first 13 incarnations to freeze Gallifrey in a single moment in time and save it from the extinction-level aftermath of the Time War ("The Day of the Doctor")

An aged Fifth Doctor appeared as one of the “Guardians of the Edge” in an afterlife, inside the Doctor’s mind in the final Thirteenth Doctor special, to the Thirteenth Doctor as well as being a hologram programmed by the Doctor herself in ("The Power of the Doctor") (2022). He also appeared as a hologram to an older Tegan and he said he never forgot her.

The Fifth Doctor's chosen mode of dress was a variation of an Edwardian cricketer's kit, and he was even seen to carry a cricket ball in one of his pockets (which saved his life in one adventure). He wore a cream-coloured frock coat, striped trousers, plimsoll shoes, and occasionally a pair of spectacles. He frequently wore an optimo-style Panama hat that had a red band with a black and white pattern, which he would roll up and place in an inside coat pocket. The Tenth Doctor, who inherited various traits from this incarnation such as spectacle use, revealed in "Time Crash" that the spectacles were not actually needed to aid the Doctor's eyesight but were just for show to make him look clever (perhaps to counter his youthful appearance), although in Four to Doomsday, he makes a remark about being a bit short-sighted in one eye when questioned about the contents of his pockets, which included the aforementioned cricket ball, a book (The TARDIS Manual) and a magnifying glass. The Fifth Doctor's costume also retained red question marks embroidered onto the collar, which producer John Nathan-Turner added to the Fourth Doctor's costume in 1980. The Fifth Doctor displayed an unusually acute sense of taste in Planet of Fire, also inherited by the Tenth Doctor, Eleventh Doctor and the Thirteenth Doctor.

On his left lapel, this Doctor wore a celery stalk. He claimed in The Caves of Androzani that the celery would turn purple in the presence of certain gases in the "Praxis" range to which he was allergic, although this allergy was not mentioned by any incarnations before or since. He said that if that happened, he would then eat the celery, adding "if nothing else, I'm sure it's good for my teeth." In the same story, while attempting to revive a feverish Peri from spectrox toxaemia, he had noted that celery was an "excellent restorative from where I come from," but that the human olfactory system was "comparatively feeble." Supporting this assertion, in the 2010 episode "Cold Blood", the Eleventh Doctor asks if there is any celery handy after being subjected to a decontamination process intended for humans (which proved potentially lethal to a Time Lord biology). The Tenth Doctor poked fun at the celery in "Time Crash", describing it as a "decorative vegetable".

Peter Davison stated in an interview on the DVD of Castrovalva that he thought the clothes he wore were far too "designed" and that he would have still kept them, but wanted to add some individual flair to them, as other actors portraying the Doctor have done in the past. In an interview with BBC Breakfast in July 2011, Davison stated that the cricket jumper was his idea, as the producers wanted something that conveyed both action and eccentricity.

During production of the mini-episode "Time Crash", it was necessary to reassemble the Fifth Doctor's costume; this was accomplished through borrowing various items from the Doctor Who exhibition in Blackpool; knitting a new cricket sweater; procuring a new hat with the original band added; and Davison wearing the trousers that were originally altered for Colin Baker in the final scene of The Caves of Androzani.^[7]

The Fifth Doctor was first seen on television in the last episode of Logopolis, broadcast on 21 March 1981. Davison played the role through the 19th and 20th seasons of Doctor Who, including the 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors. Patrick Troughton (who had played the Second Doctor) reportedly advised Davison to move on from the role after three years to avoid becoming typecast, and acting on this advice Davison informed producer John Nathan-Turner that he would leave after the 21st season. In a break from recent tradition, Nathan-Turner decided to regenerate the Doctor in the season's penultimate story, to introduce the Sixth Doctor to audiences before the seasonal break. Davison's last regular appearance as the Fifth Doctor was in the last episode of The Caves of Androzani, broadcast on 16 March 1984.

Davison returned to the role briefly in the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time. Beginning in 1999, he recorded a series of Doctor Who radio dramas for Big Finish Productions. In 2007, Davison, at the age of 56, appeared alongside Tenth Doctor David Tennant in a Doctor Who special for Children in Need, written by Steven Moffat and titled "Time Crash".

Images of the Fifth Doctor are shown, alongside other incarnations, in the episodes "The Next Doctor" (2008) and "The Eleventh Hour" (2010). He also appears in "The Day of the Doctor" (2013), via archival clips.

In 2022, Davison returned to play The Fifth Doctor in the form of a AI hologram of The Doctor where he was reunited with his former companion Tegan Jovanka, and as a fragmented projection of The Doctor's psyche in "The Power of the Doctor" alongside the Sixth Doctor, Seventh Doctor and Eighth Doctor. In 2023, Davison returned to the role again in Tales of the TARDIS, when he and Tegan were reunited a second time to remember the events of the serial Earthshock and to emotionally overcome the death of their friend Adric. In all three of these appearances, the character appeared to have aged.

The Fifth Doctor has also appeared in officially licensed novels, short stories and comics.